Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Dave's Lobes

Thanks very much to the other bruschettaboy (the nice one) for excellent and Stakhanovite Watching as I have been busy avoiding writing anything about Aaro for the last meanwhile. Out of temporal order, I want to have a word about his last but one, on global warming, because I think it's really quite revealing in the light it throws on his journalism in general and his recent witterings on Brown v Blair (by the way, Dave, it really is quite unedifying to see you doing the fat jokes. It wasn't so very long ago you know, and the mere fact that the famous Guardian Weekend cover isn't on any page indexed by Google image search doesn't mean we've forgotten about it)

It's the lobes, you see, the lobes. While Nick references Freud and the psychology of forgiveness, Dave has his own theory of human political psychology. In our "right lobes", we are the horrible whinging public. Always selfish, demanding our right to drive cars and endanger Dave's kids, to throw away packaging and endanger the planet and wanting the right to a fair trial. Our "left lobes", however, are the enlightened selves who see the pure rationality of Aaronovism. If only we could do what our left lobes know to be right, everything would be OK, but our selfish lizard-brained childish right lobes always get in the way, lashing out at poor Tony, stuffing our faces with lard, insisting on the upholding of international law.

I wonder if this theory of psychology (which appears similar to a version of the godawful "transactional analysis", beloved of people with HR degrees) is part of the program at the Pritikin Institute? It's certainly more asinine than anything Sigmund Freud came up with – it is perhaps the only theory of psychology under which the idea that "people were angry with Tony because they love him so much, and they are angry because they think he might go" might have been uttered without involuntary urination.

So anyway, it is obvious what theory of politics this theory of psychology would point to. We are free in so much as we are obedient to our better selves, the left lobes. The left lobes express the General Will. None of us really want the polar ice caps to melt, do they? So therefore, we'd better bomb some more Lebanese kids and cows. Shut up, sit down, it's all connected. You're thinking with your right lobe there, you need to think with your left lobe. Of course, some people, like Dave and Tony Blair and Patricia Hewitt, have unusually large left lobes, and so maybe we should let them take charge and not trouble ourselves over much with questioning their decisions. Because likely as not we wouldn't really have anything to say, we'd just be reacting emotionally to them. You can tell the big-left-lobers from the general population, btw; the outward sign of their inner grace is that they are not fat.

Oh, of course I know the roots of this bollocks! I was about to consider how Dave applied his theory to the media, then it became horribly obvious. It was with respect to the media that it developed in the first place. Left lobe = considered, analytical pieces, barghing through the conventional wisdom on "globalisation" and "demographic change" for hours and hours, featuring John Birt and Martin Wolf. Right lobe = nasty shouting and yar boo sucks, gossip about people's sex lives, presented by Ulrika Jonsson and George Galloway. That's the root of this two lobe theory – it's our old nemesis, the "bias against understanding" from Dave's days at Weekend World. This is why I believe Aaro when he says that he doesn't mean his blog post (I nearly said article then; the fact that this was published in the Times does not, in my view, raise it above the stature of a blog post) to be an intervention in the Labour battle in the Blairite cause. He's not a Blairite. But neither is he a Millibandite. He's a Birtist.